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Posts Tagged ‘William Shakespeare’

There are, as of this writing, just 52 performances left of this amazing theatrical experience; astoundingly, Cumming’s Macbeth — in which he plays all the major characters, with the assistance of only two other players, neatly telescoped into one hour and forty minutes of non-stop wizardry — was snubbed by the Tony Awards, when it should have at least been nominated in any number of categories, most obviously for Best Actor. One might think that the entire idea is a gimmick — that one person couldn’t possibly play all of the roles in Macbeth without the entire production degenerating into a mere stunt — but Cumming commands the stage for every instant of the play, never leaves any doubt in the audience’s mind as to whom he’s playing at any given moment, and does a remarkable job of shifting characters at express train speed without even the slightest trace of hesitancy.

Consider that he’s got to memorize all the roles — the entire play from beginning to end — and perform on a stage, which is designed to look like a stark, institutional mental hospital, with absolutely no way of receiving prompts on the text, and you’ll begin to get some idea of the Herculean feat that Cumming undertakes, and brilliantly executes. As the play’s website notes, “directed by Tony winner John Tiffany (Once) and Andrew Goldberg, this ’stirring turn by Alan Cumming packing theatrical thunder and lightning’ (Daily News) is set in a clinical room deep within a dark psychiatric unit.

Cumming is the lone patient, reliving the infamous story and inhabiting each role himself. Closed circuit television camera watch the patient’s every move as the walls of the psychiatric ward come to life . . .” — and the most harrowing thing about the play is one gets the distinct feeling that Cumming, as Macbeth, will be forced to relive the experiences of the play night after night, endlessly looping out on the tragedy that he’s been sucked into, over and over again until the madness and horror of the scenario is well-nigh unbearable. This is a piece that will only work as live theater; you have to witness it directly. Anything else would get in the way.

As a reviewer in The Huffington Post wrote, “Macbeth with Alan Cumming: another dazzling and brilliant one-person show. Yes, Macbeth as a one-man show. I am so jealous; they did it so right. Johnson said that Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature; well, yes, if we say that the mirror is reflecting the essence of nature but not a realistic view of nature. Here is a way to do Shakespeare as realism; you have a single madman in a hospital reciting all the parts. In that way the Elizabethan dialogue is no longer high Shakespearian; it is the expression of a mad character. His portrayals of the familiar Scottish murderers can’t be over the top because the characters are being played by an insane character. Macbeth is not Macbeth; it is a portrayal of Macbeth by a man losing his mind in an institution. Cumming is superb.”

A researcher in the Great Britain has unearthed the supposedly lost screenplay for a projected film version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which was to be directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, starring Olivier and his then-wife, Vivien Leigh.

Olivier and Leigh had presented Macbeth on stage in 1955, but financing fell through, and they never got a chance to make the film; more’s the pity. As The Guardian’s Steven Morris writes, “Macbeth was going to be Olivier’s fourth cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare following successful versions of Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III. He and Leigh had starred in a much lauded production of Macbeth in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955 and Olivier was keen to adapt it for the cinema.

But the project was shelved in 1958, mainly because of financial problems, and Olivier later claimed there were no surviving scripts, only a ’sketch’. Since then the lost project has been seen as a gap in British cinema history and fed into the idea of the ‘Scottish play’ as an unlucky one. More than half a century later, it fell to Jennifer Barnes, a 31-year-old English lecturer from the University of Exeter, to provide some of the answers. She was going through papers for research on Olivier’s film version of Richard III in the manuscripts reading room at the British Library when she came across references to Macbeth scripts.

‘I was going through the catalogues and I pulled up a script and found it was Macbeth. I didn’t believe it because I knew it wasn’t supposed to exist.’ The papers were part of an archive bought for £1m by the library from Olivier’s family in 2000. ‘I guess the people who catalogued them didn’t know how important they were,’ Barnes said.

The screenplay opens not as the play does, with the three witches, but with an image of Macbeth gazing into a pit at a mortally wounded version of himself, ‘his blood colouring the water all around him.’ In the early part of the movie the misty landscapes (Olivier had planned to film on location in Scotland, and the script mentions Inverness, Skye and the village of Scone) provide a stark contrast to the solid castle interiors.

Later the distinction becomes less strong as Olivier envisaged the damp fog invading the enclosed spaces and the greys giving way to reds as the action turns bloody. At times Macbeth and Lady Macbeth morph into the witches and there is one shot in the script in which the Macbeth’s head dissolves and transforms into the witches’ cavern.

The biggest surprise, however, is the loss of part of Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger?’ speech. Olivier intended to miss out the opening lines and start the speech halfway through as Leigh’s Lady Macbeth dips her hands in the dead king’s blood. Olivier was not planning to show Macbeth carrying out the murder.

Barnes believes the screenplays shed an intriguing light on the relationship of Olivier and Leigh, which was breaking down by the late 50s. ‘One of the recurring stories was that Leigh was taking away Olivier’s power, making him a lesser man. I think there is an emphasis on the breakdown of the Macbeths’ marriage in the screenplay.’

Here’s a very interesting modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, although William Shakespeare gets absolutely no credit whatsoever for his input into the project. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer for a pittance at PRC Studios in 1945, Strange Illusion was one of the studio’s prestige efforts, starring Jimmy Lydon, Sally Eilers, and most importantly, Warren William, as the nefarious Claude Barrington, an unscrupulous criminal, who masquerades as Brett Curtis, a wealthy man about town, who in reality is in inpatient at the asylum of Professor Muhlbach (Charles Arnt).

As Barry Meyer summarizes the film’s plot, “Paul Cartwright (Jimmy Lydon), a sensitive young man still shaken by his father’s death a couple years previously, has a dream in which he witnesses the violent car crash that took his father’s life, not as an accident, but as murder. In the dream, he also sees his mother (Sally Eilers) and sister Dorothy (Jayne Hazard) being seduced by a shadowy stranger, who Paul fears may be his father’s murderer. After returning to school, Paul still cannot shake the awful dream, and when Brett Curtis (Warren William) comes to court his mother, Paul realizes that the occurrences in his dream are beginning to come true. He enlists his friends and the family doctor to help him uncover the secrets hidden in his nightmares before his mother gets tangled in the web of deceit spun by Curtis.”

An interesting and perceptive essay on the film is Stephen Buhler’s “The Psychology of Teen Hamlets: Edgar G. Ulmer’s Strange Illusion,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28.4 (2011), which sharply deconstructs this transgressive film’s unique approach to the source material. Ulmer was always able to make something out of nearly nothing; here, with a solid cast and an excellent script, the results are quite remarkable.

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him wdixon1@unl.edu or his website, wheelerwinstondixon.com